


If You Be Hungry Then Feed

by NervousAsexual



Category: Thief (Video Games)
Genre: Fear, International Fanworks Day 2019, Major Character Injury, Spoilers, spoilers for Return to the Cathedral
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-16
Updated: 2019-02-16
Packaged: 2019-10-29 11:39:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,610
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17807312
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NervousAsexual/pseuds/NervousAsexual
Summary: A thief comes to the Hammerite cathedral and the eye observes him.





	If You Be Hungry Then Feed

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Regaining Balance](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4158078) by [rednightmare](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rednightmare/pseuds/rednightmare). 



For so long it waited with only the undead for company. Some small cold comfort they were, witless, slow, barely an improvement on the Hammerites. They wore paths into the floor of the cathedral as if unable to stop.  
  
After decades of inertia a curious thing upended the balance. For the first time in half a century an outsider walked through the sealed quarter. A thief, untouched by the decay around him, who perched in the window and listened in silence to the eye as it told of the elemental wards. The thief left without breaching the cathedral walls.  
  
It did not expect him to return, and yet he did, bearing the talismans to break the wards. The thief must have been very clver indeed. It wondered what he would do should he find himself locked in the cathedral with only the undead for company. It endeavored to find out.  
  
The thief came to its resting place above the Hammers' altar, jumping nimbly from the second floor to the altar as if the distance were nothing. The hand it wrapped around the eye was cold yet damp with sweat.  
  
"Well done, thief," it whispered to him. "Now that you have claimed your prize, may you escape with your skin."  
  
The thief was as a breath of wind after the stillness of the underground. Though it remained blind, the eye, tucked into a pocket at the thief's side, could feel the duality in him. He moved as a keeper would, but no keeper would do what he did.  
  
It had forgotten the struggles of mortal ones. Its undead guards were efficient, effortless, and so very limited. This near to the thief it felt the sensations that the thief felt. It felt the adrenaline that ran through his veins when an apparition passed by, near enough to touch; it felt the shiver and chill as the thief felt his way through the flooded cathedral basement as clearly as if it too were flesh, and when the thief paused for breath in the shadows before finding his way outside it too ached with nerves.  
  
In the courtyard poor deluded Murus still struggled, still believing after all this time that he might see the Builder's heaven. The thief shook as if in fear as Murus spoke, all but convinced the scrawny young mortal before him was an initiate. It stayed silent in Murus' presence. It suspected it knew the priest's intentions but let him carry on. Murus' fate no longer mattered.  
  
The thief's heart juddered in his chest as a haunt passed them and it felt his fear, both exhilarating and wearying. It felt the crunch of bone as the thief fell too far too quickly down the broken steps outside St. Yora's and it felt the almost tearful frustration the thief felt at the fracture.  
  
It waited, warm and patient, as the thief did the priest's bidding, and it knew that the thief had no concept of the power he was carrying. The thief thought himself independent but he would not be here if not for the bidding of another. Were it not for Murus the thief would surely not have found himself forging holy symbols in St. Tenor's, and were it not for another's commission he would not have come to the cathedral.  
  
It did not know as a certainty who had sent the thief, but it suspected. That suspicion was more than the thief had. He didn't understand the role he was playing in something so grand.  
  
It lay so near the thief and wondered that one who saw with his own two eyes could be so blind.  
  
When at last the fetching was done the thief limped to the cemetary where Murus' body lay and in a low tired voice read the prayer of consecration over all that remained of the priest.  
  
"O Master Builder, we ask Thee to bless our brother who hath died in Thy service. Forgive him the transgressions of his living days, and look with favor on his works in Thy name. Plumb and plane, fire and forge, purify his spirit and draw from him all which does not meet Thy plan. Take him to serve with Thee in Thy Home where he may rest in peace eternal."  
  
He spoke as one that did not believe what he said, but Murus seemed proud of his new acolyte. He remained deluded to the very end.  
  
The thief left with an explosion, the device that had lain in the armory still useful after all this time. Wearily the thief made his way through the rest of the quarter and it felt him trembling with effort.  
  
It was carried to a dark room off a dark alley, where the thief retreated to lick his wounds. When he had bound his fractured ankle he lay back on a narrow cot and pulled it from his pocket.  
  
"You better be worth this," the thief whispered, and slept.  
  
It had waited decades. The hours it took for the thief to rest were a mere moment compared.  
  
When the thief rose again he carried the eye in his hand to the mansion of the one he called Constantine. In the darkened room, all but empty, the thief gave over the eye and at last it lay heavy and blind in the hand of the Woodsie Lord.  
  
"I can't tell you how pleased I am with you, Mister Garrett," the trickster said in a voice he had surely stolen. "I simply can't find the words. But perhaps Viktoria can help me in that regard. She has such a way with them."  
  
From the shadows came the trickster's consort, a woman it had never seen yet knew by sight. "Yes," she whispered, "we are both so very pleased."  
  
The thief grew tense at her appearance. "Viktoria?"  
  
"Even though the Eye is... defective."  
  
The distance between them barely dulled the frustration, the nerves, the ache, that it felt through the thief. "What?"  
  
"Viktoria is quite right, Mister Garrett. I don't mean to sound ungrateful, but this eye is completely blind."  
  
"It's a rock. It's what you asked for. Am I gonna get paid or not?"  
  
"Of course." The form the trickster had taken melted away, his disguise past its usefulness. "Viktoria, are you prepared to give Mister Garrett his... compensation?"  
  
Although he was clever, although he moved with the grace of a keeper, the thief hesitated in the last crucial second and the consort, unfurling herself into the nymph she had always been, extended a thicket of branches that pinned the thief to the wall. The eye felt as though still with him the impact that forced the air from his lungs, the pressure of the tendrils that pinned his limbs and held his head in place, the fear that tore through him as if the cathedral had been merely a dream.  
  
"Bow to the Woodsie Lord," the nymph ordered, "and offer up your flesheye so that his eye of stone may see, Manfool!"  
  
The thief trembled and his eyes grew wide with fear, and with hardly an effort the nymph plucked his eye from its socket.  
  
The thief cried out but it was still the restrained cry of one who had always kept to the shadows, more pained but no louder than he had cried when he'd fallen in the cathedral.  
  
"Bids he then the spruces to singer him an anthems," the nymph said. "And the Woodsie Lord binders them fleshes to stone." She released him, still tangled under the crushing weight of her branches, and he fell heavily to the floor.  
  
The trickster came to the thief's side. "Did you think those ancient phrases were mere words, Manfool? Look at me!"  
  
The thief's breaths came in short spasms. He looked at the trickster.  
  
"I am the Woodsie Lord, the Trickster of legend!" The nymph gave over the bloodied eye and the trickster took it lightly in his fingers. "If you be thirsty, fleshthing, drink of me." It could feel the flesheye, so near, and reached out with its claws. "If you be hungry, then feed for I am the honeymaker, and the jacksberry!"  
  
And the eye ate of the flesh eye, and it saw and knew and understood.  
  
"He am the leaf that feeders on the fleshed ones," the nymph proclaimed. "Thems that calls themselves Builders and weilding up a hammers against him!"  
  
"My poor Mister Garrett." The trickster came beside the thief and the eye pulsed with power it had long since forgotten. "You will not live to see the sprawling glory of it! Your sacrifice is not yet complete."  
  
It reached to each world and neither, through the spaces that separated them. It felt as though flesh itself the desparate beating of the thief's heart, the sweat that ran in rivulets over his bloodied face.  
  
"Mine lilacs and mine thistleaids must feeds, and I?" spoke the woodsie lord, but the eye knew as the pagans did not that the thief barely heard their words. He clung to consciousness as only one who fears dying can do, his pallid trembling hands holding to the branches. As the woodsie lord carried the eye past it felt the thief's strength gave out.  
  
Unchecked the bleeding would kill him. He would not regain his consciousness, he would never free himself from the nymph's branches, and yet the eye knew as it opened the way for the trickster's creatures that this was not the last it would see of the thief.  
  
It did not feel pity, or pleasure, or pain. It did not feel anything. But if it had, it would have looked forward to that moment.


End file.
